Alcoholic
by thanatophilia
Summary: all about lily chou-chou 3 stars 2 times and the flowers in the rain.


_Lily, from the latin lilia, plural of lillium "a lily," cognate with Greek leirion, both perhaps borrowed from a corrupted pronunciation of an Egyptian word. The color sense of "pale, bloodless"._

"Hoshino broke it," he whispered.

Hoshino broke it.

On the eighth day of the eighth month, he purchased a pack of cigarettes, smoked them all in a ghost chain, vomited tar in the morning.

It was the only time he hadn't felt sick in years.

He stared at himself in the mirror, vomit dripping from his chin, his skin ashen, and his eyes wild.

"Hoshino broke it," he told the mirror, watching its cracks spread through his face.

He shuddered and stuck out his tongue, a hideous red snake coated in brackish stomach acid. Hoshino broke it, his tongue. He shuddered, his stomach revolting.

The tar spilled across his lips, into the sink.

The lighting throbbed.

The tears wound hot paths down his ashen skin, lava and ash, fire and sickness. Plague.

"Hoshino broke it," he promised himself, crumbling to the tiles.

«How very beautiful.»

Hoshino broke it. He dragged the edge of his blade across his collarbone. The blade changed with his mood, box cutters and letter openers, steak knives, pocket knives, antiques stolen from a pawn shop, another from an old woman's house.

"Reach out…" Hoshino whispered. The boy's throat tasted like red velvet. "And take it…"

His hand rested over the boy's heart, his hand became a fist, like plucking fruit from a bough. His muscles spasm, fingers clenching. He crushed it, blood spilling from the crevices between his fingers.

The boy made a sound like a sob, but he would never cry.

Hoshino scowled, cut his promises into the boy's skin.

"Yuichi…" He never did know whether or not he loved that boy's silence.

«Does she know our names?»

Lips. Soft, light, hesitant, wicked.

Kisses.

"Hoshino."

Stars dotted his cheek, he smiled, a slow sad smile. Hoshino shuddered. It was his name, and yet… The revulsion rose in him, strangled him until he saw nothing but bruises.

"Hoshino."

"Shut up."

Black and purple, darkening. Yuichi's… thin lips… bruising beneath his own. Kisses. Harsh, punishing.

«This music is the meaning of love.»

Flowers made him think of her. As he walked, he kicked off their heads, pulled them from branches.

Hoshino broke it.

His ribs felt too tight. His mind a broken shower of memories and emotion.

How long has it been since he felt the sleek peel of an apple in his hands?

"Where is… my mind…" he hummed to himself, uncertain of where the ether flowed. Hoshino must have broken that too.

«Am I alone?»

She approached him, her violence in her hands, her greed at her throat. Yuichi did not look up, turned his face away and pursed his mouth.

"Are you mute?" she questioned, her voice like a snake. Her full breasts, her wide swinging hips.

Yuichi knew Kanzaki was a bitch, a horrible girl, his mother would hate her. He didn't answer her, he could feel her breath on his neck, she was calling him a coward.

"You weren't too dumb to lead Kuno to--"

Kuno. Yuichi's stomach clenched and he looked up sharply, his eyes wide. Kanzaki drew back in surprise at first, but then smiled that sick smile of hers; cruel and petty. She'd hurt him, how wonderful, she basked in it.

Yuichi wet his lips, relaxed his face, strained in despair, and said, "What does Hoshino tell you to call him when he fucks you?"

She tried to smile; a whore's smile, a woman's smile, secretive and delighted at all prospects of sex. The pain in her eyes betrayed her. She spat at the floor.

"You first." She thought she was being clever, sharp. She didn't know.

Yuichi smiled at her faintly, she was shocked to sympathize with that expression. The knives, the beatings, the tests, the humiliation. The sick devotion, the love, the fear.

"Sir," Yuichi whispered. "What about you?"

She flushed all the way down her chest. "Master."

Yuichi nodded, turning away from her again. "I guess that makes us different to him then... huh..." he mumbled to himself as he walked away.

«Everyone knows Lily.»

He found fragments of his broken voice that day. Hoshino took him by the throat that night and broke them all again.

Barbed tongue delving the depths of his thoughts.

Hoshino broke it.

_Philia, combined form meaning "friendship, fondness," from Greek philia "affection," from philos "loving." _

"Hoshino..."

Hoshino slammed him against the floor and his ears rang.

"Sir..."

His body ached; atrophy spreading through his thoughtless limbs and broken bones.

Hoshino always left his marks below the collar. So considerate, so sweet.

Yuichi could always feel those hands on his throat.

«What is wrong with the world?»

Sound fluttered slowly along the grooves of his mind.

_Ether, from the Latin æther "the upper pure, bright air," from Greek aither "upper air," from aithein "to burn, shine," from Indo-European base aidh- "to burn"._

The light of his cell phone stuttered out of the dark, the ring did not overcome the soft breeze of Lily in his ears.

"I love you," the phone was crying in tandem to him, he did not hear, his eyes tracing patterns in the dingy ceiling.

His ribs ached from Hoshino's caresses; his heart trembled at Shiori's insistent phone calls.

"I will watch over you," he mumbled in broken English. Hoshino must have broken that as well.

«Lily turns the sky from gray to blue.»

"Touch yourself," Hoshino whispered against the curve of his ear, his fingers wound deep into his hair, pulling and hurting.

He did not move, the knife tip pressed against his sternum, a pin prick of hysteria and he took a shaking breath. He loosened his belt, popped his buttons, lowered his zipper and did as he was told.

He closed his eyes, his senses, felt nothing as his hand moved, felt only Hoshino's gasps, which were like dying; drowning. Breaking with each inhale beside him. His arousal a spear in his side.

Izumi Hoshino smiled at him over breakfast.

"Where is Shusuke? Oversleeping again?" she asked, serving him white rice.

Yuichi pursed his lips against the urge to scream, he saved those noises for the walk home with only Lily and the fields to hear.

«Breathing makes me want to scream.»

His hands were on her, tracing the lines of her breasts. Her nipples stiffened, cold and frightened, and she hadn't cried in so long. Spoiled goods, the slick sweet interior walls of her vagina sullied and ravaged.

"It hurts. It hurts. It hurts." Laughter, if Kuno had asked her… Shiori would have told her about the laughter. "It hurts. It hurts. It hurts."

Tight entrapment. "So tight… fuck, she must be a virgin… so tight… fuck, she must be a virgin… so tight… fuck, she must be a virgin…"

Hoshino's dark eyes never smiled at her. He did not play the same cruel games with her that he did with others.

"You will do what I say or I will cut your face and fuck you with this knife. I will let everyone know what you are."

Coward she was, coward she was with that video looping in the back of her mind.

"It hurts," she had sobbed. "It hurts. It hurts. It hurts."

A music box chimed in the background, like the clockwork clinks of a great steel loom.

She cringed back from his hands and his eyes, so uncertain and so different from Hoshino, looked up at her. He pressed the money into her hands and she trembled. His hands on her.

She left that place unsullied. Yuichi met her in the alley; he had been playing with garbage. He said nothing. She wondered if he ever had, or if Hoshino had broken is voice in the womb.

«You will always be understood here.»

He lay weeping a long time, back to the ground and face to the cloud cults. It rained dark hair, sleek black threads of it, tumbling from the sky and landing across his cheeks in the gloaming.

His hands felt tacky with blood, sticky with fruit juice.

Even dead, even nameless, even bloodless, Hoshino had broken his heart.

«I'm welcome here?»

Lips. Soft, light, hesitant, wicked. Memories of the waters came to him whenever he felt lips against his own. Drowning was so frightening, made him feel so inconsequential, so helpless, and it was drowning that woke the petty rage of the small in him. Broke him, the water seeping into his lungs had broken him.

He had heard that the sea was a cruel mistress. She gave her cruelty to him and sent him ashore once more.

Lips. Soft, light, hesitant, wicked. Sickness rose in him at the touch of lips, stolen moments of his death.

He bruised Yuichi's mouth with his own, biting at his lips. Kanzaki he did not kiss.

"I have returned a greater beast," he told himself, his lips mouthing in salivating streaks against the back of Yuichi's sweat soaked neck. "A greater beast…"

Fucking with bestiality. All humans are beasts; a thousand different breeds of animal, all equally base.

He pushed Yuichi's face down into the futon, tightened his fingers around his throat, stilled his lungs and listened to the terror thrumming deep within.

He released the boy's throat as he came each time. Cresting waves of madness, sickness, and humanity as his semen flowed.

«Lily is death.»

Philia dreamt of him. Blue eyes, feline grace, understanding and weakness, and need. Philia dreamt of him for weeks, for months, for his entire life, for every moment he lost the will to speak.

He dreamt of having sex with him, a stranger who would be drawn to him the moment their eyes met. Who would need his kindness and his embrace, and who would show him kindness in return.

Philia fell in love with him, quickly, slowly, just as he had fallen in love with Lily, her half-lidded eyes, her glazed expressions.

Every moment Philia missed him, would miss him until he met him.

_Alcoholic, "fine powder produced by sublimination," from medieval latin alcohol "powdered ore of antimony," from Arabic al-kuhul "kohl," the fine metallic powder used to darken the eyelids, from kahala "to stain, paint." Definition broadened in 1672 to "any subliminated substance, the pure spirit of anything."_

«Will she save me? I'll die without her.»

How long had it been? How long had it been since Hoshino had taken Lily into his hands and snapped her rainbow sleek disc?

How long had it been since Hoshino had been before that computer screen?

How long had been since Yuichi had realized he had fallen in love with him again? How long had Hoshino possessed him, broken him? How much longer would he?

Years. It had been years, seconds, since he had slowly sheathed that knife amongst Hoshino's ribs.

His body ached, he felt sick every moment. The women he dated found him insufferable; the men could not stomach his hunger for pain and humiliation.

Broken: mind and body and soul; his heart was nothing new.

"Hoshino broke it," he told himself in the mirror and again on the train when he spotted Kuno quietly going on with her life.

«We are very close now.»

Lily whispered in his ears as he slept, and as he slept he dreamt of the blue cat. Blue eyes and feline grace, confused and hurt, needing him. He dreamt of Hoshino, broken, alone, and powerful. Petty and cruel and destructive, toying with him, torturing him with knives and asphyxiation as he grappled with his own madness.

Flowers always made Yuichi think of Shiori. Always made him think of love, hers for him, and his for the girl who had once been Kuno before Hoshino had seen his affection and tarnished it with rape.

"You are mine," Hoshino had told him. Years, hours, later the words still rang.

"Yes, sir."

«I want to die. I want to die. I want to die again.»

Lucky Strikes and black cats, Yuichi sometimes walked the mazes of the electrical towers.

He sometimes saw his friends from junior high. They barely recognized him, his sunken eyes, his caustic mouth and the nonsense which sometimes spilled from it.

"Lily will come back," he often told them in a dreamy voice. They stopped coming to see him, they avoided him in the streets, and they left the city.

Who remembered so far back in time? Memory is like a garbage heap, all of it worthless, and the old is buried deep beneath the new. Right?

Yuichi never set foot in Okinawa again, but there was always sand in his shoes, money in his pockets. He never met people's eyes, he never shook hands.

He worked, he dreamt. He dreamt and he listened.

"Just… put me inside you…" Hoshino had whispered, sometime in the past. Yuichi no longer remembered if he had been there to hear it, or if it had come to him on the wind. "I would never ever leave you."

Hoshino broke it. Broke him. His hand gripped his throat, choking off the world, filling him with himself.

Bigger than the world, he'd been. Too much madness for this world.

«I want to see you.»

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**Standard Disclaimers.  
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